DEUT1004 What is evident is that the seven [Noachide] Commandments--understood to be the obligation of the sons of Noah (i.e., all mankind) fall into three categories of divine-human, human-human, human-other– than-human relationship. (For a concise discussion of the Noachide laws--the first six as we have seen are actually commandments directly to Adam--See Encyclopaedia Judaica 12, s.v., 1189-91.). Under the first is the prohibition against idolatry and blasphemy; under the second, the prohibitions against bloodshed, sexual license, theft, and the affirmative command concerning judges, that is, to establish courts of justice in order to make sure that the other commandments are observed. One may interpret this to mean the establishment of a just social order. Under the third is the prohibition against eating flesh torn from a living animal. This latter may be understood to subsume man's obligations toward a variety of other than-human things, and--without reading our own concerns into the past--may well refer to mankind's obligation to its environment. One recognizes this theme in a specific obligation imposed upon Israel: [this verse]. To sum up the argument this far: I am asserting that the ethos of ethics in Judaism, the genius of the system, is the sense of the berit, the covenantal relationship between God and Israel (in between God and mankind) seen as the paradigmatic situation of the Jew. My argument is based upon what seems to me to be the Gestalt of Scripture, the exposition of the pattern of existence over against or, perhaps better, within the sense of existence.